Its probably a hoax, its too close not to be, but when I saw the preview for the movie "Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter" I thought, now that is not a combination I would expect, and of course "Abraham Lincoln - Patent Troll" would be equally unexpected. However, if you were doing a work of fiction you would have the descendents of Abe, who had slowly, patiently, keep the application alive in the patent office for over 167 years by tweaking the wording, a modest change there, only to have it issue in 2012 just before Facebook goes public.
Ok, its more like a National Treasure plot but still.
It's curious that his lineage dying out is an example of a very counter-intuitive theory - that the one person who is the common ancestor of everyone alive today lived as recently as the time of Christ. Basically very few people keep their genetic lines open for more than a few generations, those that do are ancestors of enormous numbers of us.
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Its probably a hoax, its too close not to be, but when I saw the preview for the movie "Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter" I thought, now that is not a combination I would expect, and of course "Abraham Lincoln - Patent Troll" would be equally unexpected. However, if you were doing a work of fiction you would have the descendents of Abe, who had slowly, patiently, keep the application alive in the patent office for over 167 years by tweaking the wording, a modest change there, only to have it issue in 2012 just before Facebook goes public.
Ok, its more like a National Treasure plot but still.
Despite Lincoln having four sons sadly he has no living descendants. His line ended 1985 with the death of his 81 year old great-grandson.
There is a disputed descendent, born 1968 and today living in Florida, but his DNA was never tested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Lincoln_Beckwith
It's curious that his lineage dying out is an example of a very counter-intuitive theory - that the one person who is the common ancestor of everyone alive today lived as recently as the time of Christ. Basically very few people keep their genetic lines open for more than a few generations, those that do are ancestors of enormous numbers of us.
http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf